Hi ya boys,
I keep saying, I will start taking photos again, but my camera sits in the corner collecting dust.
My photo club was last week on Thursday, so you probably have been expecting me to drop in and share with you some of my club photos.
Four of the five photos I submitted were from my archives. I was pleased to be able to find something to share and that was brand new to the club.
This one was a manipulated photo using Dynamic Auto Painter, my favorite processor and the most extreme processor. I took this shot at our photo club's indoor shoot using still life set ups.
It showed well on the TV screen at the meeting.
Enjoy your day,
LORELL
04-21-2025, 09:08 PM (This post was last modified: 04-22-2025, 01:07 AM by Man From Ironbark.)
Ditto to what Rich said.
The start of a good meal there. These are Lophochroa leadbeateri, taxonomically speaking.
Commonly, Major Mitchell's Cockatoo, though Leadbeater first described it.
and, there's at least one pair for the last three seasons, looking at this tree in my front yard as a plausible nesting site. First they have to find a place they can dig out to make the perfect hollow. It is what the cockatoo's big pair of passing secateurs for a beak is usually used for. This is usually a work that takes several years to produce.
Lorell, you (and your always great images) have been missed.
Lot's to admire in this one: the tilted composition adds energy, there is intriguing detail in the dark basket, great range of values, and the colors really pop. You've shown many times your ability to decide how far to push an effect - this one takes it pretty far, stopping just before too much. Good judgement, as always.
MFI, those are handsome birds. I'm guessing that they can be quite noisy - is that right?
Don't blame me - I didn't vote for him!
Nikon D7500 with Nikkor 18-300 mm; PSE2021, PSCS5 Ny Flickr Albums
I was planning on returning to this site yesterday but we lost power due to high winds. And then I got busy, or lazy, and failed to return.
Thanks, fellas, for sharing your nice comments.
Wow, Peter, that is quite interesting, as always. Several years to build a nest, wow, that is along time. In the meantime, are they nesting in other vacated nesting areas? Do they fight over empty nests like our sparrows do?
Our birdhouse that we HAD hanging from our garage, which was used for the last 15 years or so, fell and broke the previous summer. Unfortunately, there was a baby inside, and it didn't survive the fall. For Christmas, John bought me a new bird house and I thought it might take several years before the birds would accept it, but the house is practically full of twigs, dead leaves, shavings, etc. We usually have about three families in our birdhouse during the summer. No sooner does the runt leave the pack and another family moves in.
04-22-2025, 05:05 PM (This post was last modified: 04-22-2025, 05:07 PM by Man From Ironbark.)
Dave, they are loud because all cockatoos are loud but these are the quietest of their noisy relatives. In contrast to a screech, they have a heart warming laughing sound when at fulll volume and a gentle chuckle when settled or eatiing. They were here at times during the year when their numbers are swelled by youngsters, when I first took up this bit of land. However, when nesting they become solitary pairs with large distances between them and other nesting pairs. In contrast to those of the galah, populations of pink cockatoos have declined rather than increased as a result of man-made changes to the arid interior of Australia. Where galahs readily occupy cleared and part-cleared land, pink cockatoos require extensive woodlands, particularly favouring conifers (Callitris spp.), sheoak (Allocasuarina spp.) and eucalypts. Unlike other cockatoos, pink cockatoo pairs will not nest close to one another, so they cannot tolerate fragmented, partly cleared habitats, and their range is contracting. In 2023, this species was reclassified into the genus Cacatua by the International Ornithological Congress; although it represents a very basally diverging member of the clade, it shares close morphological, behavioural, and vocal features to other members of the genus. Due to this, the former genus Lophochroa may be better considered a monotypic subgenus of Cacatua.
Lorell, they naturally nest so far apart that nesting disputes would have been rare before we cleared the land and reduced their nesting habitat. They need old trees with hollows already established. Basically this has caused the species decline so that there aren't enough of them to fight over the fewer and fewer nesting sites.
The process of aiding trees to produce hollows goes on constantly by ripping sections of bark off so that the end of the branch dies and eventually drops off, leaving a place for a hollow to be started. In doing this the various cockatoos are helping each other make nests for the future. This pruning also helps the trees to last through dry times.
The species is listed as endangered. Their existence is now threatened even more by the rapid expansion of irrigated almond orchards within their range. Though a protected species, this doesn't stop some orchardists from illegally shooting them.
"Pink cockatoo" was its official name (with Major Mitchell as an alternative) in the 1926 official RAOU checklist, and was reinstated as the official name in 2023 following the IOC's taxonomic change.[14] The bird became linked to Major Thomas Mitchell after he described the species in glowing terms in his books on his expeditions, calling it the "cockatoo of the interior". Mitchell himself called it the red-top cockatoo. Before this John Gould had called it Leadbeater's cockatoo (derived from the species name) in 1848,[7] as had Lear in 1832.[8] Gould added that people of the Swan River Colony called it pink cockatoo, and recorded an indigenous name Jak-kul-yak-kul.[15] Other names include desert cockatoo, and chockalott, chock-a-lock, joggle-joggle, and wee juggler, the last anglicised from the Wiradjuri wijugla. Because I live in Wiradjuri country, we have always locally known them as Wee Juggler, in English.
I think what I found to be most remarkable was that the birds rip off the bark of the trees so that the limb dies.
Do the birds use the bark for any other purpose other than to kill the limb?
That is a higher level of thinking!
Part of the bark ripping is to also stop predators like the perentie from climbing to their nest. It also makes it more difficult for other birds to gain a footing while the occupants are defending.
Then there's the fact that all parrot beaks have to be trimmed down or they'l keep growing which eventually makes it difficult to crack seed and eat.
